🏀 Startup Spotlight: ScorePlay Is the Invisible Infrastructure Running Sports Media for 200+ Pro Teams

In 2021, a French startup nobody had heard of got a call from Toulouse Football Club asking for help managing their photos. Four years later, that same company is the media infrastructure backbone for over 200 professional teams across the NBA, NHL, Premier League, LaLiga, Bundesliga, and MLS — with a 100% customer retention rate, three-times year-over-year growth, and a Series A cap table that reads like a who's who of sports royalty.

That company is ScorePlay. And it might be one of the most quietly dominant sports tech bets in the market right now.

Founders Victorien Tixier (CEO) and Xavier Green (CTO) did not build ScorePlay from a whiteboard. They built it from a frustration they watched play out in real time — standing on the sidelines of professional games and inside broadcast trucks, watching talented creative teams fight a losing battle against their own workflows.

The problem was hiding in plain sight. Pro teams had more camera angles than ever. More content. More platforms. More sponsors wanting assets, more athletes wanting clips, more broadcasters needing footage — all on tighter timelines than the industry was designed for. But the infrastructure underneath all of it had not caught up. Photo teams used one system. Video teams used another. Social lived somewhere else. Nobody could find anything fast, and the process of getting content from the camera to the fan was painfully, expensively manual.

Tixier had already sold one company — a digital suite for five-a-side football centers — and Green had spent years as a data engineer at Amazon. They knew exactly what they were looking at: a massive, unsexy operational bottleneck inside one of the fastest-growing content industries in the world. They started with Toulouse Football Club and a simple mandate — help them manage their photos better. That was the wedge.

ScorePlay is, at its core, the media operating system for sports organizations. It centralizes every piece of content — photos, video, live broadcasts, highlights — into a single AI-powered workspace. The platform automatically identifies and tags athletes, sponsors, and partners using computer vision. It then routes the right content to the right destination: the athlete's personal feed, the sponsor's brand portal, the broadcaster's archive, the league's distribution channel, or straight to the team's social accounts.

What used to take a team of people, multiple platforms, and hours of manual review now happens in minutes, automatically. The platform accelerates live sports uploads by 12x, and because it integrates across the entire rights chain — players, clubs, leagues, federations, sponsors — it does not just save time. It creates entirely new monetization opportunities that previously required too much manual effort to pursue.

The teams using ScorePlay daily read like a sports fan's bucket list: the Sacramento Kings, Inter Miami CF, NYCFC, Orlando City SC, Angel City FC, Major League Pickleball, Athletes Unlimited, Volleyball World. MLS signed a league-wide content distribution deal. FIBA — the international basketball federation — liked it so much they invested. The platform now runs inside 50+ U.S. professional teams, 100+ European clubs across the top five leagues, and 50+ leagues and federations worldwide.

One of the most telling signals about a product is when sophisticated people use it before they invest in it. Alexis Ohanian — co-founder of Reddit, founder of Seven Seven Six — encountered ScorePlay through his involvement with NWSL and women's sports media. He was a customer. Then he became a check writer, co-leading the Series A alongside Harry Stebbings' 20VC.

That is a different kind of conviction. Ohanian did not back ScorePlay because the pitch deck was compelling. He backed it because the product worked on something he cared about, and he saw what it could become.

He was not alone. The Series A investor list is the kind of cap table that makes other investors pay attention:

Giannis Antetokounmpo via BYL Ventures. Kevin Durant and Rich Kleiman's 35V. Eli Manning. Alex Morgan via Trybe Ventures. Nico Rosberg, the Formula 1 world champion. UFC heavyweight contender Ciryl Gane via LORi6 Ventures. Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins. And FIBA, the governing body for international basketball, as a strategic institutional backer.

These are not celebrity vanity checks. These are athletes and operators who have lived inside the problem — who have watched their own content get delayed, misrouted, or lost in broken workflows — and recognized that ScorePlay was the fix. That is worth paying attention to.

At the time of the Series A close in February 2025, ScorePlay had posted three-times year-over-year revenue growth and was profitable. In a funding environment where investors have learned to ask hard questions about unit economics, those two facts together are rare enough to be a genuine differentiator.

The 100% customer retention rate is arguably the most important number in the deck. Once a sports organization runs their entire media operation through ScorePlay, the switching cost is enormous. The platform becomes load-bearing infrastructure. It holds years of indexed, tagged, searchable content history. It is wired into the broadcast chain, the social workflow, the sponsor portal. You do not rip that out. You expand it.

Total funding now stands at $20 million, and the company came out of the Series A with both the balance sheet and the customer base to make the next phase of growth aggressive.

Tixier and Green were both named to Forbes 30 Under 30 — a recognition that reflects not just the traction but the velocity. They are French founders operating in New York, building at the intersection of AI, media rights, and sports infrastructure, in a market that is simultaneously consolidating (leagues getting bigger, rights deals getting larger) and fracturing (more platforms, more channels, more content demands).

What stands out about how they have built is the discipline. They did not chase celebrity deals or blow the cap table on marquee logos. They started with a French football club, proved the workflow, and expanded deliberately. By the time Ohanian and Stebbings led the Series A, ScorePlay had already achieved the retention and profitability metrics that most Series A companies only talk about hitting in the future.

The tailwinds behind ScorePlay are structural and durable. Global sports rights deals are at all-time highs. Every league is now a media company. Athletes have their own audiences. Sponsors want more personalized, faster content delivery. And the number of platforms demanding fresh content — streaming, social, broadcast, web, in-venue — keeps growing.

ScorePlay is not a niche tool for one part of that stack. It is the connective tissue between the camera and every downstream consumer of that content. As AI gets better at tagging, categorizing, and eventually generating content variations, ScorePlay's platform becomes exponentially more powerful — not as a replacement for creative teams, but as the infrastructure that lets them move at the speed the modern sports media ecosystem demands.

The Series A gives them the capital to deepen integrations, expand into new sports verticals (the MLS and pickleball deals hint at how broadly the model applies), and continue building the kind of global league and federation relationships that turn a vendor into infrastructure.

ScorePlay sits at a rare intersection: a genuine enterprise software business — sticky, profitable, high-retention — wrapped inside one of the most culturally compelling verticals in the market. Sports media is not a trend. It is a multi-decade structural shift in how content is produced, distributed, and monetized, and ScorePlay has quietly become the platform that makes all of it run.

Two young founders who built something real, the right way, with the right early customers, and a cap table that has genuine domain credibility behind every name on it. This is the kind of Series A bet that institutional investors look back on in five years and say they wish they had been paying closer attention when it was still this size.

Watch this one closely.